Zora Neale Hurston, author, dazzler, gets a Google Doodle

[boston bean]

Zora Neale Hurston, celebrated Tuesday in a Google Doodle, died in 1960 in a welfare home after giving the world some of its greatest literature. Although her greatest renown came after death, in life the African American novelist and anthropologist was a dazzler.


She grew up in America's first all-black incorporated town, Eatonville, Fla., from which she drew in her fiction. Today, the small city proudly proclaims it was "authenticated by the works of Zora Neale Hurston, a writer, anthropologist, a black woman."

Hurston's schoolteacher mother was an inspiration to her, pushing her to "jump at de sun." After her mother died and her preacher father remarried, she left home at 14, putting herself through school at Morgan Academy in Baltimore and Howard University in Washington, D.C., working at various jobs including manicurist and maid.

She arrived in New York in 1925 with $1.50 to her name, yet she still made a splash.

She "dazzled" at a formal literary affair, flinging a red scarf and animated stories to the room. Among those she impressed was author, activist and playwright Langston Hughes, as well as Annie Nathan Meyer, a Barnard College founder, who then made Hurston the first black student at Barnard, where she studied anthropology.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/shareitnow/la-sh-zora-neale-hurston-google-doodle-20140107,0,3459553.story#axzz2pktJKu9s

[RainDog]

1. she was a pathbreaker in so many ways

she wrote unapologetically about enjoying sexuality while also commenting on the complexity of the same. of course, this upset some people who wanted to present virtue to offset stereotypes about race.

what a brave, heroic woman.

[shenmue]

2. Awesome